Pre-9th Century

The Dead Sea Scrolls

A portfolio of loose plates offer facsimiles of the fragments of the Second scroll of Isaiah, The war of the Sons of light with the Sons of darkness, and the Thanksgiving scroll which are at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Most of the manuscripts date from the 3rd to the 1st century BC. They were not discovered until the late 1940s. This was one of the first publications to make scroll contents public. Oxford University Press started its Discoveries in the Judean Desert series in 1955 which has made most of the Qumran texts available. Over the years The Qumran caves have yielded manuscripts of every book of the Hebrew Bible but Esther and are important in tracing the history of Hebrew scriptural text.